Mental Health At Work: What Every Team Leader Should Know

Posted on March 26, 2014

Mental health is a topic everyone can relate to. We all personally know what it’s like when you miss the train or you're late to a meeting - we all know what it feels like to be stressed and how it impairs our ability to make good decisions. And we're seeing more and more businesses recognising the impact of mental health - 50% of all long-term sickness relates to mental health.

Any employer of any size who looks at people who are off sick long-term will recognise this - and all businesses recognise the benefits of workers in good mental health, as they’re engaged and fully productive. A Warwick University study found that people in a happy state of mind are 12% more productive. In the UK, a lot of businesses are knowledge-based and the human component is key.

If you’re a business of 20, 30, 40 people, you don’t have the resources to absorb a significant level of incapacity – the SMEs feel this much more than the large corporations. They tend to have less structure and formality but they are better at dealing with this issue than we might think.